Review of No One Writes Back by Jang Eun-jin

*No One Writes Back* by Jang Eun-jin (2009). Published by Dalkey Archive Press.

If you’re one of the more dedicated readers of my blog, you probably noticed in the last blog post about a Korean literature book I bought that I mentioned I had bought two books. For those who haven’t read that review, what I was saying is that while I was in NYC for work, I stopped at McNally Jackson before a Broadway show I was seeing to purchase some books.

I like how they divide the books up by regional literature, so I stopped in the East Asian literature and ended up picking two books up that were from the Library of Korean Literature. No One Writes Back was the second book I picked up that day.

While I read My Son’s Girlfriend, the other book, when I was in New York, I waited until I was back at home to start and finish No One Writes Back. I read the first half in one sitting, then left it for a week or two before returning to the title to finish the rest.

It was a really interesting novel, though, I just didn’t have the time because of all of the graduate school work I had missed when I was in New York.

Anyways, I’m rambling. Let’s get into the review!

A young man wanders Korea with a blind dog.

Our protagonist in this novel is unnamed, but we do know that he’s wandering around with a blind dog, Wajo, that he pretty much inherits under somewhat sad circumstances. He describes at lengths about how without him, Wajo would basically be nothing and have no one to exist for, which is really sad.

But on the other hand, he doesn’t really exist to anyone without Wajo. He wanders from motel to motel with the dog, writing letters to people he knows.

He expects an answer back after mailing all of these letters, but when he checks in with his one friend who’s keeping track of where they would arrive, he realizes that no one is bothering to write him back.

Three years have passed in this routine of wandering around the country in search of something greater than what he is experiencing, and along the way he meets people who he gives numbers. Like how he himself remains unnamed, the people around him also are not given a name.

What he’s basically doing this entire time is collecting the stories of the people he interacts with, but things are about to change for our narrator when a woman in the subway follows him home one day.

She spotted him getting robbed while getting off the subway (he was doing the thing where he rides the subway to one final stop to another in search of entertainment and people to watch), and they end up forming a weird bond where they platonically share a room.

So the two of them, and Wajo, continue to roam. They continue his travels and the woman tries to sell her novels wherever they go, until an argument forces them apart. There’s still this naive little hope though that someone is going to write him back, especially one of the people who met him along the way of his journey, as that would be the catalyst and final conclusion to bring everything to an end.

However, the happy ending does not really come. I won’t go deep into the ending of this collection, but I will say it is predictable in some ways. This is a novel about the journey of getting to this point though, and I will say I was devastated at finishing this one. It was a very good novel.

Overall Thoughts

I found this to be quite the poetic piece, and definitely right up my alley when it comes to the kinds of books I usually read. While I wasn’t a fan of the other book I had picked up during this trip, No One Writes Back was quite the winner for me.

I thought the writing style was just gorgeous and immersed us in the world of the narrator, who’s dealing with loneliness and grief in a way that’s so particular to me. I don’t think this book is for everyone though, although I enjoyed it greatly.

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